More and more of the objects we use in our daily lives include software, from cars to communication devices to toys. In the digital world you never really own that software, you’re simply given a licence to use it.

So what does that mean for our notion of 'ownership'. If your car won’t work without the software that controls the engine, does it really make sense to talk of owning the vehicle?

New York University’s Jason Schultz has his doubts.

Also iFixit’s Kyle Wiens and his crusade for the right to hack and repair. And Fredrik Stromberg talks to us about a new form of encryption that could be a life saver for human rights activists and journalists.

Guests

Professor Jason Schultz, Director of the Technology, Law and Policy Clinic, New York University

Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit

Fredrik Stromberg, originator and architect of the encrypting memory card Zifra. Co-founder of the VPN service Mullvad.net

Transcript

Antony Funnell: You've just hopped into your brand new car, new car smell, a whole lot of new devices on the dashboard, it's great. It cost a bit, but it was worth it, because it's new and it's all yours, the tyres, the comfy leather seats, the software that powers the engine, all yours!

Well, no actually. The software belongs to someone else. To a company. It's the same with all of your mobile devices. When it comes to ownership, you own less than you probably realise. So does that mean we need to rethink our notions of ownership?

Hello, Antony Funnell here and welcome to Future Tense.

Today on the show, we begin with Jason Schultz and his aptly titled new book End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy.

He's a professor of law at New York University and director of their Technology, Law and Policy Clinic.

Jason Schultz: The impetus for the book was to try to talk about something that I think technologists and lawyers and other people are starting to notice but hadn't quite been named, which is that there is something different about the way we bought things in the digital economy than there had been in the way that we bought things and kept them in the physical or old economy. You would buy it but you wouldn't quite have it all. Pieces would be missing or it would be dependent on a company that was running a bunch of servers on the internet, and if the servers went down or disappeared, suddenly you lost your music or your movies. Or you wanted to share it with a friend, you wanted to loan them a book and you couldn't all of a sudden, or you decided you wanted to sell something that you'd finished, like say you finished a book or you finished listening to some music or watching a movie, and you're like, oh, I should get rid of this, clear it out, and you couldn't.

And as these things started to change, my co-author and I started to look at the law, and what the law would say and why the law would or would not allow certain things, but then also the technology and the way the technology changed and to try to describe this different kind of relationship we had to things we bought that were digital that's different from the things we bought that were analogue or physical in the old way.

So my favourite example for this right now is John Deere, which is a tractor company in the United States, and for over 100 years farmers in the United States would buy John Deere tractors, it's a big brand, and you bought it, you own it, you use it. If it broke, you fixed it. And about five years ago there started to be this shift where software would appear in these tractors. And then the farmers did what they always did which was when it broke down they tried to repair it, and they couldn't because there was software code running inside, software code they didn't understand. And they started to crack it open and hack into it, like anyone would on a farm, you sort of look inside under the hood.

And when they started to modify the software and tried to fix it and customise it, John Deere sent out threat letters where they would say you can't actually change your tractor, we own it, it's still ours, we've just licensed it to you like a piece of software. And they actually said that the farmers didn't own the tractor anymore, but they merely had a licence to use it as long as it ran. And whenever it broke down or it needed repair, you needed to come back to John Deere to reprogram it and fix it. And that was a major shift, but it was one that John Deere and a bunch of car companies now pretty much have bought into wholesale.

Antony Funnell: So the change hasn't just happened because technology is different, it's happened also because corporations, the manufacturers of the devices that we use in all sorts of ways in our lives, they've changed their attitudes as well. They've realised that there are corporate benefits from changing our understanding of ownership, is that correct?

Jason Schultz: Absolutely. Most of the corporations that make products these days who want to incorporate software realise that they can keep the customer tethered to them, that it's not when you walk out the store door you've gone away and they don't know who you are, they can track you, they can keep you coming back for more, they can keep you coming back for whatever you need.

There's a coffee company who makes these little coffee pods that you stick into machines, and a few years ago they tried this where they said you can only use our coffee pods to make coffee on our machine, and if you use any other coffee pods, including your own coffee that you might stick in a pod, we're going to shut down the machine, and the machine literally shuts down and gives you this warning flag saying you are not using the right kind of coffee. They want to continue that relationship, they want to milk it, and they want to make sure that you are loyal to them technologically and legally.

Antony Funnell: So the situation has changed with regard to ownership, but does that mean that it's a downgrade in terms of consumer rights and the consumer experience?

Jason Schultz: It's definitely a shift that we are watching happen where we don't know all the outcomes. Some of them are going to be good, some of them are going to be not so good. The good ones arguably are that you can offer different kinds of prices. You might have gone to the record store to buy an album, it cost you a certain amount of money, you bought it, you took it home with you, and then it's up to you. It might break, you might leave it to your kids, you might give it to a friend, all that sounds good. But what if they offer you a cheaper version? Well, that's essentially what streaming music is, so you can subscribe to Spotify and listen to the music and you don't actually have to own it anymore, it could be cheaper, it could be better for you.

But the difference is, let's say you want to collect music and you want to have a record collection. Well, you can't really do that on Spotify because Spotify constantly changes with songs that are available. You might have put together a brilliant playlist that you're going to use for your holidays. Well, it turns out that Spotify no longer offers five of the 25 songs and the playlist doesn't actually run anymore. Those are shifts that we are seeing that people aren't necessarily aware of.

Antony Funnell: The discourse though hasn't changed, has it. We still talk online in the digital world about buying things, we are encouraged to buy things now. So that language hasnt shifted, in a sense. Is that deceptive?

Jason Schultz: I think it might be. So we did a series of studies, my co-author and I and a friend of ours who is also a colleague, Chris Hoofnagle, on what people think when they go on, say, Amazon or some other service and they see a button that says 'buy now', click 'buy now', I think I bought it, I own it, right? And most people think of when they bought it that they get to keep it forever, they get to play it or read it or watch it on any devices of theirs, they might get to share it with friends and family, they might be able to give it away, resell it. But it turns out of course you can't do most of those things. And so this idea of what we buy is changing in ways that I think most consumers aren't aware of. And we don't really have an alternative language yet, we don't really know what we're doing. So I think the companies are using 'buy' but I think even they are realising more and more it's not the right word.

Antony Funnell: Companies would say that there are licence agreements, that you have to agree to the terms and conditions for a contract, say with software, and that that is a way of informing the customer about the nature of the relationship. But we know, don't we, that most people don't actually read the terms and agreements, they just tick the box or they click on the button.

Jason Schultz: In fact some of the studies that have been done say that even if you did sit down and read them, which nobody does, not even lawyers, and you read all the agreements, it would take you 2,000 hours per year just to read all the agreements for all the things that we buy and subscribe to and sign up for. No one has that amount of time and no one should have to spend that amount of time to understand very simple transactions.

Antony Funnell: So when you look ahead, what's your prognosis for the future?

Jason Schultz: I think a lot of companies are going to keep trying it because there are some benefits to them, but I think as more and more consumers discover that they can't do the same things they've always liked to do with the things they buy—they can't move them around, they can't modify and customise them, they can't make them personal in the ways that they are used to making them personal—think there are going to be a lot of consumer objections. And I think if consumers object enough, companies will have to shift and modify to the point where they offer some form of ownership, where we actually can keep things and use them as we like, and some forms which are more temporary, so we can at least pick and choose between the two.

Antony Funnell: I mean, this is not an argument then, from what you are saying there, just about owning something, almost like a physical idea of I possess this particular item or this piece of software, it's also about our rights or our ability to modify or to personalise what we've bought, isn't it.

Jason Schultz: Absolutely. So take the car, for example. We buy a car, we own the car, we can customise it, not just in terms of the windshield wipers and the tyres but the paint colour and what kind of sound system is in it and things like that. But just recently Tesla who makes these modern, advanced cars, offers a self-driving car option, an autonomous car option. But in the fine print they say while our car may be able to go into this autonomous mode, you won't be able to use it with Uber or Lyft as a commercial thing, so you can't drive for those services using our mode, you can only use it in the future with the Tesla network that we are going to launch. So this car that we think we own, part of it is actually still owned by Tesla, and they won't let us do what we want with it. So these ideas of using things that we buy as we like and are making them our own, it's dramatically changing every time software appears inside of them.

Antony Funnell: Is this corporate change, this change of attitude towards ownership, are we seeing it being tested with litigation?

Jason Schultz: There are some versions that are being tested in the United States. So, for instance, there is a court case right now, Capitol Records vs ReDigi. ReDigi is a company that try to create a marketplace to sell digital music that you didn't need any more that you bought. So you download music from iTunes, you're done listening to it, they would offer a marketplace where you could find someone who wants to buy it, it would delete it from your computer, transfer it to their computer, and you'd get a gift certificate for iTunes actually. And they got sued by the recording industry, and the recording industry has won a victory at the trial and it's on appeal. But this case is really going to help decide do we have any rights to resell the digital things we buy or are we basically stuck with them at the mercy of the publisher or the music company that sold it to us in the first place?

Antony Funnell: We know with technology traditionally that regulators are often years, sometimes decades behind the changes that go on. Is that also the case with this?

Jason Schultz: You know, it's interesting, we've seen some regulators start to really care about this issue, particularly in the sense of the things we buy that are very personal or affect our families. So, for instance, there's a new version of the Barbie doll that Mattel put out called Hello Barbie, and this version of the Barbie doll was connected to the internet and actually had a microphone that would listen to you and your child talking or your child and their friends, transmit that back to a cloud computing service that would then suggest what Barbie would say in response. This upset a lot of parents and upset a lot of child advocates because it was essentially spying on children. That was a kind of situation where regulators jumped in to ask Mattel and other companies not to record children and not to invade their privacy.

But this is one of those things about ownership. When you went to a toy store and bought a toy for Christmas and you brought it home, you didn't expect it was going to be spying on you and your children. And so this shift in who the toy is loyal to and who it belongs to is something I think regulators are watching in that context.

Antony Funnell: And taking up that example, this is also then about the ownership of our data, isn't it.

Jason Schultz: Exactly. One of the ideas behind ownership is autonomy, that you yourself are able to control what happens with what you own. You can keep it in your house, you can put it somewhere else, and the idea that the manufacturer of the thing you bought gets to collect data on you every time you use it, it's a different kind of relationship. It's not an ownership relationship where we control what the thing we bought is doing and not doing.

One other issue that comes up around ownership is preservation. So we keep a lot of things, maybe too many things in our garages and other places, but we do it because we own them and we can keep them as long as we want.

One of the things we are finding in the digital economy is that sometimes if the company retains some form of ownership they will actually delete things or they will let things disappear. In other words, they become stored someplace that can't get access or the company will go out of business and you can no longer get your files. And so one of the other things that we are concerned with is that saving all of our culture, our music, our movies, our photos, the moments that we have, may actually not be in our control anymore.

So a recent example is the Galaxy 7 Samsung phone is a phone that has a very dangerous design, it can catch fire, it can explode, and they issued a recall. But in addition to simply issuing a recall where people could voluntarily send theirs back, they've now sent out an update that completely kills the phone, shuts it down completely and makes it unworkable, basically a brick. What's unclear is whether if you had saved photos or important text messages or emails to that phone, whether they are recoverable or not. You don't have control over that, Samsung kept control over that phone, even though you bought it.

Antony Funnell: So just in summary, it seems to me from what you're saying that we know that the technological changes that have happened in the digital age have happened very fast and have been very extensive, but there still seems to be a negotiation that needs to go on or a kind of rebalancing about what are the rights of the corporation, of the people who provide the devices that we use that we enjoy, and our rights as an owner or somebody who has bought those devices, doesn't there.

Jason Schultz: Yes, I think ownership served that function for a long time, where if you owned something it was a form of protecting your own rights and basically giving you control over the kinds of things that you used. Now it is much more of a negotiation, but it's also something that isn't clear. It's very ambiguous, it's very complicated, it's buried in all this legalise. And I think not only do we need to offer more opportunities for consumers to have some choices so they can actually pick what they want, but we need to make it simple, simple and understandable, not complex where you need a lawyer. And we have forms of this. When you go to the library and check out a book, you don't think you really own the book, you are borrowing it, right? We use words like borrow and lend. We know what those things mean. When you rent a movie, you don't think you own it, you rent it. So we have words we can use. And I think the digital economy needs to evolve to a point where we have words that are as simple and elegant and precise as those words.

Antony Funnell: Jason Schultz, thank you very much for joining us on Future Tense.

Jason Schultz: Thank you for having me.

Antony Funnell: And Jason's book is called The End of Ownership, co-authored with Aaron Perzanowski.

Kyle Wiens: iFixit's mission is to teach everybody how to fix all their stuff, and we've been at this a long time, we've taught millions of people how to fix their iPhones and their laptops and their cars and their bicycles. We have repair information for all kinds of things.

Antony Funnell: That's Kyle Wiens. And iFixit, the service he just mentioned there and which he founded, is an interesting website-come-activist network. If you can't fix it, says Kyle you don't really completely own it.

Kyle Wiens: We've run into a lot of companies where they've said that their business model is better suited to having you buy a new thing when it breaks rather than repair it. And so we've been systematically working to find those obstacles and break through them. Sometimes that is you can't get parts, so we'll go out and track down parts. In a lot of cases there just weren't repair manuals available. I learned that Apple in particular had been fighting to make sure that there were no repair manuals available for Apple's products. And so I decided to just write my own repair manual, and that's what iFixit has become, a free repair manual for all kinds of things.

Antony Funnell: And you believe that this is a deliberate thing, that this is actually a manufacturing strategy to make it harder for people to fix what they own so that they will go out and buy new products.

Kyle Wiens: Yes, we found that this is systematic. I mean, it goes all the way back to the light bulb manufacturers in the '30s and '40s where they realised that if they made the light bulbs last longer, people wouldn't buy as many. And now we see this with electronics. Why in the world does a cellphone come with 16 gigabytes of storage and there's no way to add an additional storage module? You can get a 120 gigabyte little flash memory chip for 20 bucks, but they don't want you to be able to put that in your phone, they want you to have to go and buy a new one.

Sometimes they will glue products together. We see this with cellphones, you know, the batteries in phones need to be replaced every 400 charge cycles. And if they glue the battery in, then you can't do that. It's kind of like buying a car, we need to change the tyres on a car every 30,000 or 40,000 miles, but if they welded the tyres to the car I don't think we'd be okay with that. But with batteries and cellphones that's exactly what they did, they glue or solder the batteries into the phones so that the phones only last a year and a half to two years and then you have to go get a new one because there's no way to swap the battery. We've been working to make it easier for people to swap batteries.

Antony Funnell: For many people that is a frustration that they face. But you would say that there are also environmental issues here at stake, aren't there.

Jason Schultz: Right, it is really shocking how much raw material goes into manufacturing electronics. It's over 500 pounds of raw material that goes into making a cellphone. And out of all the elements on the periodic table, at 50 of them are in your phone, and only 12 of those are recoverable in recycling. So there's actually no way to take a truck full of all cellphones, grind them up, melt them down and make new cellphones, we can't do it, we are really bad at recycling things, even in the best facilities in the world.

So if we are going to go to all the effort of mining and digging up that 500 pounds of raw material to make a phone, I want to get as much utility out of it as we possibly can. That's where we think there's a huge environmental benefit to fixing things. So we have been working…and there's a number of states, there is actually eight US states this year that have introduced 'right to repair' legislation that would require companies to sell parts and make manuals available. And that legislation is interesting but of course we are getting pushback from Apple and John Deere and others. It's been a major challenge with automobiles for a long time. If there weren't 'right to repair' laws already on the books, there's some in Europe and the US, for cars, you wouldn't be able to take your car to a local garage to get it fixed, you'd have to go to the dealer. So having those protections to make sure that local independent repair shops can exist has been really essential for the automotive industry, and I think it's time that we see that in electronics industries as well.

Antony Funnell: You advocate for the 'right to repair', as you say, but the website you've set up, you've developed a community, haven't you, around iFixit, a community of people who are volunteering their specialisation in certain areas to try and help people overcome this product obsolescence problem.

Kyle Wiens: That's what has been so fun about iFixit, is this idea that I might know how to fix a couple of things but I don't know how to fix very many things, and you probably know how to fix a few other things. And so if we pool our knowledge, you teach me how to fix what you know, I teach you how to fix what I know, all of a sudden we build this really robust resource.

And so we've been building kind of a Wikipedia for fixing things where everybody goes on and shares a few titbits, snippets, troubleshooting techniques, maybe you find a faster way of doing a particular repair, and over time we built a phenomenal knowledge base. We've got over a million members on iFixit, and they are posting troubleshooting information for lawnmowers, for Epson printers, for Nintendo. I'm looking at a post where a guy was working on his Honda and he stripped a bolt and he's looking for advice; hey, I stripped this bolt, how do I get it back out? And he's getting really good answers.

In some cases you actually need the circuit schematic and the manufacturer won't make the circuit schematic available, so people will basically reverse engineer that, which is a lot of work, but once they have created that schematic, they post it online, then everybody can benefit.

Antony Funnell: What are the legal issues around doing that? Has concern been expressed by any authorities or companies? Have they tried to stop you on legal grounds?

Kyle Wiens: As long as we are reverse engineering the product, so like you lift the bonnet on your car and you take pictures, you do a repair, you're creating your own content, you own that content and it's not a problem at all to share it.

Antony Funnell: In Australia if you try and repair an item yourself, you can inadvertently void your warranty. Is that an issue in the United States or is that an issue that you've come up against?

Kyle Wiens: Warranties are generally only 12 months, so by the time you've had something for a while and you break it, usually it is older than 12 months. Even if it's inside the warranty, you breaking it kind of voided the warranty, or at least it voided the warranty on the component that you broke. So I'm not generally concerned about warranties. If it's inside the warranty period, don't try to fix it yourself, take it to the manufacturer, they'll fix it for free. If they won't fix it for free, then you might as well fix it yourself. So that really hasn't been an issue. Also the manufacturer is not allowed to void the warranty on the rest of the device just because you replace one component. So let's say you have a car and you are six months in to owning the car and you put new tyres on the car, you might void the warranty on the original tyres, but you haven't voided the warranty on the entire car.

Antony Funnell: The website is called iFixit. Kyle, thank you very much for your time.

Kyle Wiens: Thanks for having me.

Antony Funnell: And this is Future Tense, we're a podcast, we're a radio program and we're there online to be reviewed. So if you get the opportunity to knock out a review, by all means tell others what you think, just text me beforehand and tell me where to send the cheque. I'm Antony Funnell.

Changing tack now and gathering information in many parts of the world can be an extremely dangerous activity.

BBC report on North Korea: At the university entrance our minders bow before a huge statue of the Generalissimo.

Our minders are now rather upset with us because we tried to do a piece to camera in front of the statue of Kim Il-sung here and they clearly felt that we said stuff that was not respectful to the great leader, and now we are in trouble.

We're told that if we don't delete the offending footage, we will not be allowed to leave the campus.

Antony Funnell: Our next guest has been working on a piece of technology to try and help protect the photos and vision that journalists and others collect in difficult situations.

Fredrik Stromberg: I would probably say that groups such as filmmakers, photojournalists, human rights workers, human rights activists, they all face a critical gap between the moment they document something, like if they take a picture of something that people don't want them taking pictures of, or they might be interviewing a source or a whistleblower, they face a critical gap between that moment and the moment when they can secure their source material. And what Zifra is doing is we are trying to close that gap. We are trying to help you encrypt at the source.

[video] Free press and a well-functioning media are fundamental pillars in every democracy, but around the world journalists and human rights workers are being searched and harassed by oppressive forces that wish to silence reporting crime and corruption. At Zifra we are developing a totally new memory card that can solve this problem…

Antony Funnell: The Zifra encrypting memory card is the brainchild of Sweden's Fredrik Stromberg. Fredrik is the co-founder of a VPN or Virtual Private Network service called Mullvad.net. And his new Zifra card is nearing the final stages of development.

Fredrik Stromberg: Eventually we going to have a few different configurations, so it depends on where you are and how you want the card to function. But certainly one way to have it function is that you would prepare the card before you go out into the field and then you start taking photos and you can look at the photos right after you took the photos or video or whatever, but as soon as you turn off the camera, then it's gone. So you will be unable to look at the material until you go back to your laptop or you send the card back to whoever has the key to unlock it.

Antony Funnell: So if you got into trouble, say you were being approached by police and you are in a troubled area, a repressive country, as long as you turn the camera off, those pictures that you've taken can't be decrypted.

Fredrik Stromberg: Exactly, and that is where we close the critical gap, or at least make it more narrow than if you had to go back to your hotel room and encrypt the pictures. As a journalist you want to bear witness and document whatever story you are trying to tell, but you don't want to have to deal with the issues of securing your laptop. So by removing the laptop from the equation and encrypting the material as soon as you document it, what you can do is you can just take your pictures, you can go back to your hotel room and you can email the pictures in the encrypted form to your editor-in-chief, who might be in Australia and not wherever you are.

Antony Funnell: And they might have the keys to actually then decrypt what you've sent them.

Fredrik Stromberg: Exactly.

Antony Funnell: I read late last year the Freedom of the Press Foundation called for major camera manufacturers to look again at the kind of encryption that they provide for their cameras. That surprised me in a sense because I would have thought that there would be cameras out there that built in this kind of encryption. Why has it taken until now, until your technology, for this to be looked at seriously?

Fredrik Stromberg: Totally. There have been a few attempts at doing something like this before but they have been made by camera manufacturers that don't have any experience in the security arena. And unfortunately those solutions were vastly insecure. So no one is using those anymore, or at least I would hope so.

The reason it has taken this long to make a technology like ours, I mean an actual memory card that encrypts instead the camera can encrypt on the fly, is because the technology hasn't been there yet. Let's say you tried to make this card five years ago, then you would have to build what's called an ASIC, which is basically using the same technology that we used to make CPUs, and that's an investment of minimum $10 million, versus what we are using which is a programmable processor called an FPGA, and FPGAs cost $30.

Antony Funnell: And the cost factor is going to be important then in terms of making this available for all types of people to use in various situations.

Fredrik Stromberg: Totally. For starters, it's such a niche product that even now it's kind of a challenge to figure out the economics of it. But certainly what we would love to do in the end is to make this available to activists in developing nations as well, and for that to happen we need the cost to be very low.

Antony Funnell: The card looks and will function basically like a normal SD card that you will put into your camera or other device. I presume that's important, to have that kind of standardisation so that it will be functional for various types of cameras.

Fredrik Stromberg: Yes, exactly. So the reason we want to build something that works like a standard memory card is because obviously, like you said, you can use it in any type of device, you can use it in a dictaphone, in a video camera, in a regular camera, any type of model. So instead of building new software for, let's say, just one model of one camera, we can help anyone with any type of recording equipment, as long as it conforms to the standard, and that will surely help with costs because you don't have to invest in new equipment.

Antony Funnell: And when do you expect to actually see the card out there on the market?

Fredrik Stromberg: We are still working on the technology, but we have removed a lot of technical risk in the past few months. So I would expect that we have a prototype somewhere between one and three months from now. We certainly don't want to start selling it before we have verified all the security aspects of it. But tonnes of journalists and various organisations have told us that this is a great idea and there is a great need. The need is not as pressing in Sweden where I'm from, but certainly when Swedish journalists are outside of Sweden they would need something like this. I think we're going to discover more and more use cases as we keep having conversations with people.

Privacy is basically the ability to choose who you are sharing information with. And in this era where we are living more and more of our lives in the digital realm, that means if you can't trust your devices then you have no privacy because what will happen is that you will retract into yourself and you will stop sharing information, and what that means for journalism I think is that…well, first off, your sources are not going to trust your technology, so they won't share with you, and you as a journalist will self-censor in the stories you choose to tell or work on, which inevitably is terrible for democracy.

Antony Funnell: Fredrik Stromberg, creator of the Zifra encrypting memory card. And that interview brings us to the end of our program. Thanks to Peter McMurray, this week's sound engineer, and also to my co-producer Karin Zsivanovits.